Empty U.S. milk jugs in Malaysia. Dirty Canadian diapers in the Philippines. Why is garbage being shipped around the world? Part of the answer could lie close to home—in big blue recycling bins. One thing’s certain: The world’s poor countries are tired of being treated like trash.

Most of us throw trash away without giving every plastic bag, yogurt cup, and soda bottle another thought. But where do those cast-offs go? In theory, recycling helps deal with the debris. But too often usable items get mixed with unusable ones: plastic wrap with paper, Styrofoam with cardboard—and food waste making the whole lot a greasy mess.

Since 1995, China has bought much of the world’s trash—some estimates say up to 70% of it. Chinese laborers sorted it and reprocessed the usable stuff.

But China has wearied of sorting other people’s trash, much of which is too contaminated to use. (See “Recycling Changes.”) Last year, it banned imports of “recyclables.” That left exporting nations scrambling for new places to offload their junk.

Now trash-shipping problems have boiled over in the Philippines and Malaysia. Sometime in 2013-2014, a group in Canada shipped a literal boatload of trash to the Philippines using fake records. A corrupt official there accepted the containers, which were probably headed to an illegal recycler.

Sixty-nine containers of electrical and household waste, including used diapers (pee-yew!), stood rotting in Philippine ports for five or six years while the two countries haggled about who should take out the trash.

After a lot of finger-pointing and blame-shifting, the Philippines shipped the containers of rotting rubbish back to Canada. The whole stinky lot will probably get burned.

Another South Asian country is also experiencing an influx of garbage after China’s ban. In May, Malaysia returned some 3,300 tons of non-recyclable waste—egg cartons, compact discs, cables, and electronics—to countries such as the United States, Great Britain, and Australia.

Malaysia’s Environment Minister Yeo Bee Yin says her country and many developing countries have become targets for rich people’s rubbish. “Malaysia will not be a dumping ground to the world,” Yeo says. “We can’t be bullied by developed countries.”

Luke 6:31 says: “As you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.” In the trash wars, that could mean not shipping garbage in the first place. It could mean shutting down illegal plastic recycling facilities, enforcing laws, and respecting others’ property. For most of us, it probably means using our God-given resources more wisely.

Slideshow

Greenpeace activists show a banner as the garbage cargo ship MV Bavaria enters the mouth of Subic Bay, Philippines. (AP)

The “garbage ship” arrives to pick up and return 69 containers of Canadian garbage the government in Manila says was shipped illegally. (AP)

The Philippines government says these containers of garbage were shipped illegally years ago. (AP)

A Malaysian official inspects a container filled with plastic waste prior to returning it to the country that sent it. (AP)

Malaysian officers inspect a container full of non-recyclable plastic in a Malaysian port. (AP)

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Why don't they dump it into a

Why don't they dump it into a volcano? And let it melt. We could get rid of all the trash in the world. Just fly a helicopter over the volcano and dump it. It is not like we don't have them. There is at least a 150 in the U.S.

That is weird that the

@Nadia

When I saw your comment about the volcano thing, the way you said it made me laugh, when you said " are you serious, it might work, but who would want to fly over a volcano". It just made me laugh inside and out.

LE

@Isaac

It would be hard to ship garbage to a place where they had valcanoes( and they might not have helicopters where they live) and have someone fly over it ( the helicopter could have something wrong with it and break down and fall right into the volcano and die) and dump trash, and then they would have to reload it. There is so much trash in the world that it would take forever because there are not enough volcanoes around the world for 1,000 of people to do it around the world.

The volcano trash disposal idea

That idea actually is a really good idea Isaac! But I just thought of another problem with that idea. Who knows how the lava in the volcano might react? You’ve seen mentos in coke right? What if the volcano reacts just like that!?

@ Loreleie E

I'm not fully understanding

I'm not fully understanding the legality of recyclers, so please feel free to educate me but: Why can't governments simply make the illegal recyclers, who obviously want the trash, legal? Then our trash would get taken, the foreign countries would have a way of disposing of it, and those recycling would make money. Are the illegal ones unsafe, or do they not meet work standards?

MN

TRASH

Often trash can be salvaged, Like, remember when U threw that plastic Wal-Mart or Target bag in the trash? It is not legal to recycle those in the United states, but U could melt down the about 150,000 Tons of it. (This is why China did this, and they made a TON of money making Cheap-o toy's out of.... You guessed it! Plastic bags!)
So, this is a reason to recycle, Also, plastic is grown, on plants, and recently, they found a worm that eats plastic! (Did U know that the US owes over 9 TRILLION dollars to other country's? This sounds like a good thing, to salvage trash! More jobs... More money... No more trash... I see no downsides! Also, I had this idea to deconstruct it on a molecular level, then reassemble, so, Make food out of dirty diapers! Gentilly engineer plants that Use chloroplasts (they make sugar from sunlight and Co2, and make protein to put in the food!

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